•The Strategy Of Other Companies For Facing The Wal-Mart

The first of Porter’s Five Forces is the threat of new entrants. According to the case study, there has been a wave of new entrants to the retail industry. These include Best Buy, Costco, Wal-Mart, Old Navy and the recently irrelevant, Target Canada. The second force, the threat of substitute products or services, is also prevalent in the retail market. Inevitably, the target audience that the Hudson’s Bay Company is trying to cater to, will shop at other retail stores for the same goods due to consumers behaviours and preferences. Another impacting force is the bargaining power of suppliers. However, this force does not play as large of an impact to HBC as one might initially assume. Traditionally, HBC among other large retail stores makes a large percentage of their

1) What sources of cost advantage does Wal-Mart rely upon to execute its business-level strategy in the US? Walmart was able to fly under the big company’s radar for a while by putting stores in rural towns. They were able to buy land for cheap and once they opened a store the town could not support another store of similar size. And everyone played a part in keeping the cost down, from owners buying cheap hotel rooms to people taking out their own trash. They wanted to drive the cost down as low as it could possibly get. With suppliers Wal-Mart presented unlimited growth potential due to its size, so Wal-Mart could easily press for a lower price and high quality and suppliers would deliver to keep their business. They

Is Wal-mart the ideal store to shop it? Austrian economic and business professional Karen De Coster and banker Brad Edmonds believe that Wal-mart improves the lives of people in rural areas because it gives them access to a lifestyle that they would not have if Wal-mart did not exist.

Stores are also competing in other forms in order to secure loyal customers. Some of the forms are product range and quality by which stores are offering privately-labeled products that are primarily used in the commodity lines at lower prices.(Australian Government, Department of Agriculture) This has caused a significant shift in the industry, thus allowing players like ALDI who started with a private labeled product early on to gain and improve its market share. Another major form is convenience where several non-price factors such as opening hours, strategic locations, parking area, distribution options (delivery or in-store pickup) and online shopping comes into play. (Australian Government, Department of Agriculture)

This strategy guarantees that the company does not loose out on the venture by covering their fundamental costs of operation. This allows them to keep the price low enough to entice consumers while simultaneously hedging themselves from the risk of losing money on each item sold. This is basis for a market penetration strategy.

Wal-Mart’s sheer size gives it unrestrained economic power which allows it to drive down costs in the retail and manufacturing sectors and to enact its own standards with regards to its work force.

Competition among retailers is aggressive, as the demand side of the industry is driven by consumers who expect to get the best value for their money. “Competitive advantage is anything a company has, or does better, that customers value but the competition cannot match” (Romero, 2005). Walmart has a sustainable competitive advantage over other retailers, largely due to their centralized focus of cost leadership and differentiation strategies.

In business, three major strategies comprising of cost leadership, differentiation, and focus strategies exist. The focus strategy emphasizes on providing services and products to a specified buyer group or market segment within a given geographic market. The differentiation approach is often defined as provision of services or products that are perceived to be unique in the market place. Wal-Mart emphasizes on the long-term strategy of cost leadership. Through this strategy, the company ensures that it offers customers with quality products at relatively lower prices than other providers in the industry. Through overall cost leadership strategy, Wal-Mart has been offering better quality products at a lower price than any competitor can offer. For the organization to achieve this goal, it has developed long-term supply chain management, which ensures that products are made available to the market at the required time (Enz, 2010).

This is also an appropriate strategy because of the increased competition that the retail/discount industry is facing. While Wal-Mart is at the top, they are increasingly seeing their competition move closer to dethroning their position.

According to this case, and concerning about the strategy that Best Buy has created, retailers can similarly create a retailer-led product strategy to leverage their customer knowledge for product differentiation and to understand what the needs of the customers are; they must discover what satisfies the customer and what not. In addition, the retailer can seek for news partnerships, new stores, new countries and new categories and services in order to increase their net sales and their share market. It’s very important invest in marketing study aiming to discover what the other companies are doing. Besides, with the time, the smaller retailer can increase significantly even more than the

Walmart stores can be found across the United States and 26 other countries globally, including – Canada, Mexico, Brazil, Puerto Rico, Ghana, China, United Kingdom, India, and others. In order to adequately serve the expanding demand for quality goods at reasonable prices – Walmart has to ensure that its supply-chain functions efficiently on a regular basis. To this end, in what follows, the author explores the manner in which Walmart manages its supply-chain, the impact of the management of the same, and the organisational theory of the company – in the successful pursuit of Walmart 's vision and strategies. To commence this examination, it is imperative to revisit the fundamental vision and strategies of Wal-Mart Stores, Inc.

A focused low-cost strategy, which focuses on a narrow buyer segment and outcompetes rivals by having lower costs and being able to serve a

The main objective of a low-cost provider is to achieve a lower overall cost than its main competitors and rivals by means of underpricing (Gamble, 93). This is also known as price advantage in order to attract customers. Companies that use this strategy will achieve high sales volumes while striving for low cost margins. For example, Wal-Mart is known to have considerable low prices that attract a broad spectrum of customers. People who shop at Wal-Mart are familiar with their “Rollback Prices” which focus on the idea of everyday low prices that are sold at a far cheaper rate than its main competitors. They are able to sustain these prices because of a successful supply chain market. Many of the products they sell are from foreign and domestic markets that focus on a lower price demand. This allows Wal-Mart to sell their products at lower prices at a high volume. Basically, they buy a huge quantity in volume in order to achieve a lower price to gain a higher profit.

Low product differentiation and economies of scale: There isn’t much product differentiation at play in the retail industry as there are well known manufacturers whose products are offered for sale, which leaves price to compete on. Current well established retailers with thousands of stores enjoy the economies of scale to control their cost that a new entrant might not be able to replicate after immediately entering the industry.

This Appeals to a broad cross-section of the market by providing products or services at the lowest price. This requires being the overall low-cost provider of the products or services (e.g., Costco, among retail stores, and Hyundai, among automobile manufacturers). Implementing this strategy successfully requires continual, exceptional efforts to reduce costs -- without excluding product features and services that buyers consider essential. It also requires achieving cost advantages in ways that are hard for competitors to copy or match. Some conditions that tend to make this strategy an attractive choice